People on game shows are very emotional.
Saturday morning I finally admitted to myself that Dawn was staying away only because I was still there. I’d been alone now for three days, except for Wang and the silent anonymous other servants – from time to time the phone would ring, but it was Wang’s right to answer it, and he always assured me afterward it was nothing, nothing, unimportant – and all I’d done was sit around and think, and try to ignore the truth, and by Saturday morning I couldn’t hide it from myself any more.
Dawn would not come back until I had given up and left. She couldn’t throw me out of her house, but she couldn’t face me either, not now or ever again. I belonged in the room with the photograph and the panda and the old clothing, the furniture, the bits and pieces of Estelle Anlic.
I knew the answer now to the question I’d brought out here. In order to create a new person to be, you have to hate the old person enough to kill it. Estelle was Dawn, and Dawn was happy.
She had dealt with my sudden reappearance out of the past by forcing me also to accept Dawn Devayne, to put this new person in Estelle’s place in my memory, so that once more Estelle would cease to exist.
But the mother remained outside control, with her dirty knowledge; in front of her, Estelle was only pretending to be Dawn Devayne. After Wednesday night, Dawn must believe her mother had recreated Estelle also in my mind, turned Dawn back into Estelle in my eyes. No wonder she couldn’t be in my presence any longer.
I put the borrowed clothes away and packed my bag and asked Wang to call a taxi. There wasn’t anybody to say goodbye to.
Back on the base a week early, I explained part of the situation to the Commander and applied for a transfer, and got it. I told Fran everything – almost everything – and she moved to Norfolk to be near me at my new post (where my history with Dawn Devayne never came to light), and when I retired this year we were married.
I don’t go to Dawn Devayne movies. I also don’t do those things with Fran that I’d first done with Dawn. I don’t have any reason not to, it’s just I don’t feel that way any more. And Fran’s vehemence for new sexual activity was only a temporary thing anyway; she very quickly cooled back down to what she had been before. We get along very well.
Sometimes I have a dream. In the dream, I’m walking on Hollywood Boulevard, on the stars’ names, and I stop at one point, and look down, and the name in the pavement is ESTELLE ANLIC. I just stand there. That’s the dream. Later, when I wake up, I understand there isn’t any Estelle Anlic any more; she’s buried out there, on Hollywood Boulevard, underneath her name, standing up, squinting in the San Diego sun.
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Some material from this book first published in the UK
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This revised edition published in the UK by Robinson,
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Copyright © Maxim Jakubowski, 2014
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